Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study

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The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS) was a multi-disciplinary academic study on the migration, confinement, and resettlement of Japanese Americans during World War II. The project was conceived of by University of California Berkeley sociologist Dorothy Swaine Thomas shortly after Executive Order 9066 and ran through the war years under her direction. Funded by the university and several foundations, the project employed over two dozen Japanese American and non-Japanese American fieldworkers who gathered data from four of the "assembly centers," six of the War Relocation Authority administered concentration camps, and several resettlement communities outside the West Coast. The project generated three official books published by the University of California Press between 1946 and 1954. The project also generated an enormous amount of data that has been used in numerous other studies. The JERS project has been controversial due to the manner in which the data was collected and to admitted ethical lapses by its field workers.

Murray, Alice Yang. Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.

Murray, Stephen O. "The Rights of Research Assistants and the Rhetoric of Political Suppression: Morton Grodzins and the University of California Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement Study." Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences 27.2 (Apr. 1991): 130-56.

Suzuki, Peter T. "The University of California Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study: A Prolegomenon." Dialectical Anthropology 10 (1986): 189-213. Reprinted in The Big Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature. Ed. Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong. New York: Meridian, 1991. 370-411.

This material is based upon work assisted by a grant from the Department of the Interior, National Park Service. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of the Interior.